


Fraternizing

by vsyorkwin



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-24 17:43:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20362522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vsyorkwin/pseuds/vsyorkwin
Summary: Everything starts to change between them, little by little.





	Fraternizing

They talked a lot like this. Slow, circling, directionless conversations that occasionally pivoted towards the serious but never touched anything off-limits. Always: _What do you think?_ Never: _Tell me how you really feel._

Crowley loved to talk, loved the indulgence of it. He had spent a good part of the twentieth century perfecting his voice, in the same way that a young student might work on their cursive. He had mastered a certain lazy drawl, lingering absently on vowels and then snapping shut at the end of a word. Crowley liked this voice because:

  1. It belonged to him.
  2. Sometimes it made Aziriphale stare.

When the angel wasn’t around, Crowley could make himself sound furious and urgent, his voice tight with that ancient kind of anger that made even Head Office nervous. Privately, Crowley considered himself one of the most terrifying demons on the market, if he worked at it-- which, for the most part, he really didn’t. But he liked this voice, too, because it was his protection. And now it was Aziriphale’s. They had made their point, and it had stuck. _Leave us alone._

Aziriphale only had one voice, which he wore like a pair of shoes he couldn’t bear to part with. His was a knot of contradictions. Anxious but decided. Tired but nonetheless curious, nonetheless hopeful. Crowley loved the mess of it.

In the last hundred years or so, there were three standard places that the angel and demon would meet up, just to talk. The first, of course, was St. James Park. This was all well and good, especially when the weather was cold, and Crowley would wear his leather jacket, and Aziriphale would sort of shiver, and Crowley would say_ I thought you creatures of Heaven were immune to the cold_, and Aziriphale would say,_ We can be. But I like to feel everything, you know_, and Crowley would look at him, baffled, because angels shouldn’t be saying things like that. (Crowley always thought about handing over his jacket during moments like these, but the gesture seemed ridiculous, inflated, dangerous.) They passed countless afternoons in St. James Park, almost saying everything but instead saying nothing at all.

The second place was Aziriphale’s bookshop, notably at night, notably with alcohol. Despite the necessary secrecy of their meetings at St. James Park, the bookshop felt more _thrilling_, frankly. There was a surprising current in that back room, something almost reverent in their low voices. The lamp in the corner was not really bright enough to read off of, but it gave a perfect view of the angel’s face, golden-lit with dust falling in lazy spirals around his curls. Here, they discussed things both serious and silly— Armageddon, global warming, an elephant’s capacity for joy, something fairly new called Plastic Surgery— and it all felt like one and the same.

"Not that I’m complaining about my corporeal form," said Aziriphale one night, but they have made me look rather old, haven’t they?

"You are rather old," answered Crowley.

"You’re old, too. But The Powers That Be still made you…"Aziriphale let his gaze wander for a moment, and then, because he was drunk, a moment more. "Well. I shouldn’t have to say."

Crowley’s smile opened, slowly. "So you’re saying that you, angel, would get work done. With needles in your nose and all."

Aziriphale flinched. "Not what I’m saying."

"Right. Good."

Crowley loved to see Aziriphale drunk, when it was obvious that the angel was not just cutting corners but forgoing the Order of Heaven entirely in favor of some alternative way of being. This was clearest after a few glasses of wine, when the angel looked at him with red cheeks and bright eyes, and it seemed like he wanted to _live_. That was the bookshop.

The final place the two met up to talk is where they sit now. The Ritz. It’s decadent. There’s music. There’s people who aren’t afraid to be seen together. Here, talking to Aziriphale feels like swimming through something thick. Nothing’s quite right-- time is slow and dense, and the world feels somewhere else entirely. Aziriphale smiles, and Crowley wants to capture it in amber.

They have a lot to talk about today. After all, they’ve sort of done it. Saved the world and suchlike. Fought for one another. Created something unfathomable. They are both in cosmically uncharted territory, more alone and unguarded than ever.

But they aren’t talking about any of that because Crowley and Aziriphale don’t talk like that. They just circle and circle.

“I just wouldn’t be so sure of it, angel,” Crowley is saying through bites of food. “You’ve never actually seen Her. And you don’t actually know anyone who has.”

“It’s about trust. Of course God exists. That’s what this whole bloody thing is all about.”

“If a tree falls in a forest…”

“Crowley. That’s a non sequitur. You don’t make sense.” Crowley twirls some pasta around his fork and hums in response. God, he would have missed the Ritz.

“I suppose I know what you mean, though,” Aziriphale says, a bit more quietly now. “One has to wonder how much attention God pays to anything down here.”Aziriphale is looking at the tablecloth. “Maybe She should have a suggestion box.”

“_Angel!_ That might be the most blasphemous thing I’ve ever heard you say.” Crowley looks up from his fork after he speaks, but the angel doesn’t appear offended at the jab. He’s smiling, not quite making eye contact. But it’s a real smile.

“Well. These are different times.”

Circling. On good days, Crowley loves to play this game with the angel, hovering vaguely over the territory of sentiment but never resting. He likes to surprise Aziriphale with certain phrases, casually strewn. _Over here, darling._

On bad days, Crowley feels an unholy anger at Heaven, Hell, and the whole damned infrastructure of their lives telling them not to get involved in any of this.

But today is a good day, and Crowley is feeling the kind of gratitude that he’s sure Aziriphale can see anyways. It’s in the pace of their conversation, slow and easy. It’s in the wine. It’s everywhere.

“What do you call me now?” asks Aziriphale after some time. “Am I like you? A fallen angel?” Crowley, chewing, is checking for hesitation in Aziriphale’s voice. Signs of regret about the various Reckless Decisions they’ve made in the past forty eight hours.

“Well, I didn’t fall so much as—“

“Yes, yes. We’ve covered this. But tell me what you think, really.”

When Crowley speaks, it’s with intention. “I think you might be the only real angel left.” This, tonight, is the closest Crowley can come to the realm of feeling, and maybe that’s alright.

Aziriphale positively beams and sets his wine glass down. “Not the _only_ angel left, my dear.”

Crowley lets this comment sink in for a moment, with all of its implications. Heaven, with its golden fucking harps and what have you, could never match this feeling.

* * *

Here is where they begin to break from routine, after this conversation, after the Ritz. It happens little by little. First, on that same night, a walk down the streets of London. They’re both quiet.

Crowley is thinking about how wonderful it is to really make a mess of things. Aziriphale is looking at other pedestrians and walking slowly. Crowley can feel his gratitude, too.

And now they’re taking walks with some regularity, sometimes stopping by other old bookshops and browsing the aisles. And, once, the British Museum (Crowley’s suggestion) for an exhibit on Shakespeare.

“We really have gotten old, haven’t we?” Aziriphale mused from the hallway.

Crowley stood in front of a small plaque, squinting. “Ah, speak for yourself. Look, angel, they’ve got his life all wrong. They didn’t even mention the half-brother.”

They had gotten old. There was much Aziriphale had grown out of— he no longer looked at Crowley with the immediate terror of someone who was getting himself into very big trouble. He no longer squeezed his eyes shut when they took rides in the Bentley. Aziriphale wasn't fearless, per se— he still had that ever-consuming preoccupation with God’s will (or, as he put it to Crowley, “quite a healthy amount of terror about what’s to come”). But it was different. God began to mean something different to him. Aziriphale started to stand by his own will for things.

  
Aziriphale called it “the Hamlet thing” until Crowley questioned him about it.

“I thought you’d never ask,” the ex-angel said brightly. Crowley groaned, with no real annoyance.

Aziriphale starts: “So. Hamlet.”

  
“Hamlet, right. I never did like the dark ones.”

Aziriphale laughed, the corners of his eyes bunching together. “I know. But you remember the story. It’s about making choices.”  
  
Crowley knew Aziriphale, and Aziriphale had that look he always got when he was digging into his own head about something. “Go on.”

“Well, in the play, Hamlet has to decide if the thing he feels morally inclined to do— in that case, killing his uncle— will condemn him. He has to pick apart his own theory of justice, and he does, extensively, but he never gets any answers. Because that’s not how it works.”

Crowley went still, listening. They were back at St. James Park again, and he didn’t quite remember how they’d found themselves here.

“‘To be or not to be’ is thought to reference suicide, yes? But it’s also about action. Can we ever do right if we never can ultimately know what _right_ even means? If it even exists?I just think… at the end of the play, remember, Hamlet decides to _be_ and to _do_. That’s what he’s capable of. He may or may not have been justified to act like he did, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? We all know what we believe to be right. The most we can ever do is to follow that instinct.”

What Crowley wanted to say: I love you.

What Crowley said: “I’m not here for a sermon, angel.”

Aziriphale chuckled. “Rude. Why are you here, then?”

Once again, they were circling. Crowley didn’t, couldn’t, make eye contact. The Hamlet Thing— the _feeling of right_— made a pronounced space for itself inside of him.

Crowley, looking down, repeated back Aziriphale’s wine-drunk words from the bookshop. “I shouldn’t have to say.”

* * *

Crowley had grown out of certain things, too. For one, he drove slower. He moved slower, generally speaking, ever since they had saved the world together. Things became more meaningful— well, _things_ is perhaps too unspecific. His time. His rituals. His companion. Crowley would never say any of this, but gone were the days when he’d go looking for trouble, guns blazing. Now he wanted, for as long as he could, to keep what he had. To stay in place. He watered his plants, he went to the movies, and he sat quietly at Aziriphale’s bookshop, reading old literature.

Crowley wasn’t tame, though, not really. His life always had a sense of momentum, and he always felt the discreet urge to lean in.

He was digging through his things one afternoon— _Spring cleaning_, he called it, even though it was the middle of summer— and found an old box he had kept from the 1960s. (He liked to do these “time capsules,” ever since he discovered them as a concept, but keep in mind that Crowley still wants to maintain the illusion of cool, so don’t you go narc on him.) In it were four items:

  1. A deeply sixties pair of jeans that Crowley stored for sentimental value when it was collectively decided that flared bottoms were no longer in vogue. Black, with a vertical red stripe on the side. The one time Aziriphale saw Crowley during this decade (Woodstock, 1969, they were both a little curious), he declared the jeans “ridiculous,” and Aziriphale never made comments about Crowley’s clothes like that.
  2. Stolen money. Crowley didn’t necessarily _want_ to steal the money, but he found himself in a money-stealing kind of situation, and it all happened very quickly.
  3. An old Employee of the Month photograph, taken after Crowley had done a particularly impressive job for Head Office. (TL;DR: There was a reason that people in the sixties were so afraid of the fluoridation of drinking water.)
  4. Weed. Specifically, four joints. Crowley had saved them for the off chance that he might one day forget about weed.

It wasn’t as difficult as he thought to talk Aziriphale into the thing.

“Oh… I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Aziriphale said, the first time Crowley mentioned it.

“Well, all right, then,” he said, the second. Crowley always kept a lighter on hand, for professional reasons (to make friends with the wrong crowd) and personal ones (to threaten his more flammable plants), so after that it was easy.

* * *

They decided on Crowley’s place. This surprised Crowley because Aziriphale had always refused, as a rule, to come over. Ever since Aziriphale allowed it, Crowley spent entire days at the bookshop poring through Aziriphale’s things, absorbing his life for a moment, taking a break from his own— and all that implied. But the angel never seemed to return the impulse, always holding firmly to his own familiar haunts.

When Crowley had asked him about coming to his place, about fifty years ago, Aziriphale had given him a sad smile and said: _I don’t think that would be very God-fearing of me_. And Crowley had responded: _What is it, exactly, that you’re afraid of?_ And Aziriphale went up to the server and asked for the check, and that was that.

So this was sort of a big deal. For forty five minutes, Crowley had been storming around his apartment with the kind of nervous energy that filled his azaleas with unspeakable dread, when Aziriphale finally rang the doorbell.

“You made it.” With some astonishment, Crowley realized that he was nervous. “I sort of thought you… er… wouldn’t.” He was blocking the door with his elbow and did not appear to notice that fact. “What with all the book-keeping.”

Aziriphale looked at him curiously. “Well, yes. Can I come in?”

“Oh.” Crowley shuffled away from the door and opened it fully. “Yes, all right. Make yourself comfortable.” The last sentence was said with a nervous frown.

It was like a moment suspended in time. Neither Crowley nor Aziriphale spoke as Aziriphale stepped into the flat. Crowley stood very still in the center of his hallway, and Aziriphale took some time to look around. He bent over to read a title off Crowley’s bookshelf, ran his thumb along the armrest of Crowley’s black chair.

Crowley wondered if entertaining guests had always felt this terrifying.

Aziriphale walked in a singular, slow circle aroundthe whole of Crowley’s apartment, and to Crowley, it felt like a kind of apology. _I’m sorry for ever being afraid of this. _He hoped that’s what it was. He felt like a child making wild, unsubstantiated speculations about the order of the world, about other people’s impressions of things. He tried to see everything in his apartment as Aziriphale would see it— was the television too trendy, too materialistic, too garish? 

Eventually, Aziriphale spoke. “Goodness. I suppose you think I’m being rude.”

Crowley didn’t know how to respond to this. By most people’s terms, this exact sort of behavior would get you politely, but firmly, kicked out of someone’s home. Surely, Aziriphale knew this. Their particular wavelength did not align with polite society.

Crowley spoke without thinking. “I think I like you like this.” He felt a bit high, then, taking in Aziriphale’s expression, and subsequently realized that he hadn’t even thought about the weed. He took out the joints from his jacket pocket. “I was thinking one apiece for now.”

Aziriphale looked skeptically at one. “Don’t people usually share this sort of thing?”

Crowley thought about it, the thin roll of paper passing between their hands in the evening, and nearly shivered. “That’s a start.”

* * *

It’s odd how the body can suddenly become relevant. Crowley liked the way he looked in a mirror, but he didn’t really think about himself in terms of a body. Crowley was never just a body.

But Crowley was _also_ a body, just as Aziriphale was _also_ a body. This fact had never really been investigated by either of them— usually, it seemed that they both had more important things to worry about. Right now, they did not.

Aziriphale took off his jacket and put in on Crowley’s coat rack. (Crowley had acquired this coat rack by means of bribery back in the day, and he proceeded to cheerfully toss all of his coats on the floor ever since.)

Suddenly Aziriphale was just a shirt and two very pale arms. Crowley, ever disciplined, did not bring up the subject of his body until they had smoked a good half of the joint and were both, for whatever reason, on the floor.

“You know,” Crowley said, sucking in smoke, “you’re very pale.”

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” responded Aziriphale dazily. He extended his arms and looked at them. “Too pale? Crowley, am I too pale?”

“No, no,” said Crowley, laughing, then coughing. “You’re like a very handsome ghost.”

It was enough of a compliment and enough of an insult that Aziriphale just squinted at him for a moment. Then he squinted at his hands. “Ghosts can walk through walls, mind you. I can’t do anything like that.”

“Mm,” said Crowley. “Good point. You want music?”

“_Yes_,” said Aziriphale, like he had just remembered that music was a thing.

Crowley sat up and sifted through his record collection. A fact had to be addressed: He and Aziriphale had different taste. He picked something down-tempo. The Beatles. “Here, There, and Everywhere.”

Paul McCartney croons—

Here. Making each day of the year.

Changing my life with the wave of her hand,

Nobody can

Deny that there’s something there.

“Why do you flirt with me, Crowley?” The question, so densely packed, came almost offhandedly. Aziriphale was barely speaking over the volume of the song, and yet when Crowley looked back at him, Aziriphale met the ex-demon’s gaze without flinching.

Crowley was still, standing next to the record player. Aziriphale was laying on the reflective tile, looking up. Crowley, after a moment of helpless silence, lowered himself onto the floor next to his friend.

“I’ve never been able to talk to you about any of this,” Crowley said. The perforations in the ceiling sort of looked like stars. “Why now?”

Aziriphale opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and shrugged. “Look at us,” he said, finally. “I have so much to say to you, but I think I’m about to have a heart attack whenever I try and speak.”

Crowley chuckled. “Think I know how that feels.”

“Crowley.”

Perhaps— and Crowley is counting on this— there are things that can be expressed without words. Because now they are leaning into each other’s mouths, and their bodies are not only relevant but _immediately_ relevant, and Crowley has to decide what to do with his hands, fast.

It’s slow, and Crowley loves that they can both be consumed by this for a moment. Aziriphale’s not shy, he’s got his hands curled up in Crowley’s hair and is twisting each finger through the strands. Crowley realizes he loves kissing Aziriphale everywhere, the jaw, the wrist, where the lower lip meets skin.

Eventually people have to stop kissing, and they do.

Aziriphale rearranges Crowley’s hair with delicate fingers and speaks. “I always thought you didn’t like me.”

Crowley considers this. “I didn’t _really_ not like you. I just _sort of_ didn’t like you.”

Aziriphale buries his face in Crowley’s shoulder and breathes him in. “I sort of didn’t like you, too.” Crowley can hear his smile.

It’s the most either of them can say tonight. But they’re making progress.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I always love reading comments, so please let me know what you think!


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